A Venue for Citizen Journalists
Thanks to generous donations from readers, this site is renovated and improved.
Affordability has been a ruse for creating market rate housing.
Represent Us and Our Interests. Please!
Local action in support of a proposal to rebuild nationwide infrastructure
Who’s Superman when you need him? We are.
From Musk’s big investment all the way to local campaigns, political “contributions” will be re-paid. Here’s how.
Private banks are fighting hard to keep us from starting our own state bank. There’s a reason.
To be so manifestly unqualified and yet not be deeply aware of that speaks exactly to the very point of not being qualified.
Chaos likely to ensue. Catastrophe cannot be ruled out.
There is no escape from the deep-throated roar and the clouds of filth produced by these machines.
A perspective from a very old liberal political junkie.
Deeds, not talk, count on Veterans Day
Several days ago, I received the following from Veterans Service Officer (VSO), Liz Witowski, of the Whatcom County Veterans Program (items below in bold are mine). On this Veterans Day, the
An off-budget $5 Trillion National Infrastructure Bank (NIB), along the lines of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) that operated between 1932-1957, means low-cost loans and no additions to the deficit.
Medicare Advantage is NOT Medicare. Medicare is there to provide health care. Medicare Advantage is a business, there to make money.
David Swanson verifies what Jon Humphrey has said for years: good internet access benefits people, cities, counties, and states.
Or perhaps tragic farce or farcical tragedy might be more apt descriptors. Pick one, or both.
After nearly 30 years online, and literally being one of the oldest blogs on the internet, Northwest Citizen needs a major programming overhaul. To do so, we need your help.
The top 20% of commercial banks in the United States control 95% of our total banking assets. Remember “Too-Big-to-Fail”?
The City has created another useless document ensuring nothing changes and mediocre communication services are protected.
Why a vote for Jason Call for Congress is a good vote for conservatives, liberals, Democrats and Republicans. Yes, an unusual idea.
Heaven forbid our reps should attack the main problem, Medicare Advantage, head on. But no. They must nibble around the edges to give the appearance of doing something.
Morally significant double binds force doctors and combat soldiers into identical life and death quandaries, damaging their moral centers. To these two groups we can also add law enforcement officers.
Eric Hirst gives us a brief and clear explanation of the water adjudication process that is beginning now in Whatcom County
“Citing the nonpartisan Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, the paper  [Less Care at Higher Cost—The Medicare Advantage Paradox] notes that Medicare Advantage (MA) plans have overcharged the
Aggressive citizen involvement carried the day.
Build-for-profit, incarceration-inspired housing is destroying our souls.
A 54-photo tour of the ruptured pipe area of the Whatcom Creek explosion taken in July 1999.
The last of the scrap metal is loaded on the ship and it will be gone from our town.
Below is an audio tape of 911 calls, emergency responders’ radio communications, and local radio coverage from June 10, 1999 when Whatcom Creek exploded in Bellingham
Whatcom County’s confusing water rights will be defined by court proceedings beginning now
The foam of secrecy hides all.
If not killed-in-action, they are still dying from the effects of their service in Vietnam.
Local presentations scheduled on a reasonable use framework for water resource management
Broadband-Washing: Greenwashing the Internet
Pacific Northwest organizers join a global campaign to abolish all nukes and push for a city council resolution to start
If the hospitals are smelling a rat, so should Medicare (Dis)Advantage victims (AKA enrollees).
With such a bank in place, we would likely not be scrambling around and asking Congress for rebuild monies, as we are now with the catastrophic event involving the Francis Scott Key bridge on March 26, 2024.
Port of Bellingham commissioners terminate last 13 years of ABC Recycling lease
No public fiber means we can’t compete with big telecom. EVER.

The Sight Of Green

The Sight Of Green

The Sight Of Green

Trees are not expendable like weeds. We should not treat them as such.

[Guest Writer, Erin Wade, owns the salad bistro Vinaigrette, the general store Modern General and two sustainable farms in Texas and New Mexico. She was born and raised in Bellingham and spends part of the year back home.]

Humans are wired to relax and thrive at the sight of green.

This isn’t just woo-woo hippie stuff. As Esther Sternberg describes in her book, Healing Spaces, people in hospitals with a view of trees heal faster. Being around trees can lower heart rate, calm hypertension and boost our immunity. A treed landscape is part of the public good, beneficial to the community in ways we are only just beginning to understand but that native Northwesterners have probably always known implicitly. It’s the reason we love it here.

Robust development shouldn’t cost the very thing that makes a place lovable.The Bellingham Municipal Code and the Whatcom County Code need to be updated with specific ordinances that better protect trees—especially the oldest and most majestic ones—within the built environment. Austin, Texas, where I now live, is growing as fast as Seattle and has one of the most progressive tree protection ordinances in the country. I know this because I renovated and opened a restaurant there that was and remains the site of three “heritage” Live Oak trees. Yes, the Northwest has more and different trees than Central Texas. Historically, trees have been so abundant and persistent in Washington, builders tend to treat them as expendable, like weeds.

So does the code.

When I asked a local civil engineer if there were restrictions on cutting trees outside the watershed, he said, “No. It’s a logging town. The assumption is that trees are meant to be cut.” In the Lake Whatcom Watershed overlay, the area right around the lake, removal is meant to be limited to 30 percent of the canopy. But even in this sensitive watershed, the code allows an exemption of up to 5000 square feet, which in many cases is the majority of a lot. It is also easy to game the code by saying a tree is sick or hazardous when it’s not. Drive around the lake and count the lots that have 70 percent tree coverage. One hand will do.

If a rapidly growing city doesn’t protect its “urban forest,” you end up with a cityscape that is oppressively hot and depressingly devoid of green. Accelerating growth in the squelchy, carbon-breathing Northwest, at the expense of trees, is a climate change double whammy: we lose trees, which convert and store carbon, and increase the urban heat-island effect. An urban heat-island is a metropolitan area that is significantly hotter than its surroundings due to human activity and paved surfaces. Urban heat-islands intensify the local effects and extremes of global warming such as droughts, parched yards, floods, runoff, and erosion. Trees do the opposite: they cool and filter the air, conserve groundwater, hold and slow precipitation, and insulate and protect the ground beneath them.

A bolstered tree protection ordinance makes it harder for us to foist the real costs of our actions on tomorrow. And, the trees on a site become assets to be featured and utilized rather than obstacles to be cleared. The designs that result from this balance are inherently more sustainable, shaded and beautiful. They have lower heating and cooling costs, a smaller carbon footprint and are healthier places for people to live, with space for life outside and views of green through their windows. This isn’t anti-development but evolved development. Many of the stale habits of modern building became convention when nature was huge and scary, filled with lurking dangers we couldn’t see. Chopping down wild things, and fencing them out, was a matter of life and death.

Now, we live in the Anthropocene, an epoch in which humans have altered the carbon balance of the earth and atmosphere, built towering skyscrapers, reached every corner of the globe and rendered the very idea of “wildness” just about extinct. Not cutting down wild things is today’s self-preservation. Nature isn’t something “out there” anymore, kept at bay but conveniently trotted out when we need it. We have to make room for it within our homes and workplaces, while we still can, if we want our children to experience life with trees the way we did.

When I go home to Bellingham to visit my parents, who live in the same house where I grew up, most of the trees that were the background to that nature-filled childhood are gone. It’s an older neighborhood now, and many of the houses are second homes for people who live elsewhere. The families whose kids are long grown are adding garages for more cars, and the new houses being built are twice the size of the old footprints. There are fewer places for kids to hide, no avuncular trees to sprint madly toward, triumphant, yelling “ollyollyoxenfree.”



- Commenting is closed -

The Sight Of Green

The Sight Of Green

The Sight Of Green

Trees are not expendable like weeds. We should not treat them as such.

[Guest Writer, Erin Wade, owns the salad bistro Vinaigrette, the general store Modern General and two sustainable farms in Texas and New Mexico. She was born and raised in Bellingham and spends part of the year back home.]

Humans are wired to relax and thrive at the sight of green.

This isn’t just woo-woo hippie stuff. As Esther Sternberg describes in her book, Healing Spaces, people in hospitals with a view of trees heal faster. Being around trees can lower heart rate, calm hypertension and boost our immunity. A treed landscape is part of the public good, beneficial to the community in ways we are only just beginning to understand but that native Northwesterners have probably always known implicitly. It’s the reason we love it here.

Robust development shouldn’t cost the very thing that makes a place lovable.The Bellingham Municipal Code and the Whatcom County Code need to be updated with specific ordinances that better protect trees—especially the oldest and most majestic ones—within the built environment. Austin, Texas, where I now live, is growing as fast as Seattle and has one of the most progressive tree protection ordinances in the country. I know this because I renovated and opened a restaurant there that was and remains the site of three “heritage” Live Oak trees. Yes, the Northwest has more and different trees than Central Texas. Historically, trees have been so abundant and persistent in Washington, builders tend to treat them as expendable, like weeds.

So does the code.

When I asked a local civil engineer if there were restrictions on cutting trees outside the watershed, he said, “No. It’s a logging town. The assumption is that trees are meant to be cut.” In the Lake Whatcom Watershed overlay, the area right around the lake, removal is meant to be limited to 30 percent of the canopy. But even in this sensitive watershed, the code allows an exemption of up to 5000 square feet, which in many cases is the majority of a lot. It is also easy to game the code by saying a tree is sick or hazardous when it’s not. Drive around the lake and count the lots that have 70 percent tree coverage. One hand will do.

If a rapidly growing city doesn’t protect its “urban forest,” you end up with a cityscape that is oppressively hot and depressingly devoid of green. Accelerating growth in the squelchy, carbon-breathing Northwest, at the expense of trees, is a climate change double whammy: we lose trees, which convert and store carbon, and increase the urban heat-island effect. An urban heat-island is a metropolitan area that is significantly hotter than its surroundings due to human activity and paved surfaces. Urban heat-islands intensify the local effects and extremes of global warming such as droughts, parched yards, floods, runoff, and erosion. Trees do the opposite: they cool and filter the air, conserve groundwater, hold and slow precipitation, and insulate and protect the ground beneath them.

A bolstered tree protection ordinance makes it harder for us to foist the real costs of our actions on tomorrow. And, the trees on a site become assets to be featured and utilized rather than obstacles to be cleared. The designs that result from this balance are inherently more sustainable, shaded and beautiful. They have lower heating and cooling costs, a smaller carbon footprint and are healthier places for people to live, with space for life outside and views of green through their windows. This isn’t anti-development but evolved development. Many of the stale habits of modern building became convention when nature was huge and scary, filled with lurking dangers we couldn’t see. Chopping down wild things, and fencing them out, was a matter of life and death.

Now, we live in the Anthropocene, an epoch in which humans have altered the carbon balance of the earth and atmosphere, built towering skyscrapers, reached every corner of the globe and rendered the very idea of “wildness” just about extinct. Not cutting down wild things is today’s self-preservation. Nature isn’t something “out there” anymore, kept at bay but conveniently trotted out when we need it. We have to make room for it within our homes and workplaces, while we still can, if we want our children to experience life with trees the way we did.

When I go home to Bellingham to visit my parents, who live in the same house where I grew up, most of the trees that were the background to that nature-filled childhood are gone. It’s an older neighborhood now, and many of the houses are second homes for people who live elsewhere. The families whose kids are long grown are adding garages for more cars, and the new houses being built are twice the size of the old footprints. There are fewer places for kids to hide, no avuncular trees to sprint madly toward, triumphant, yelling “ollyollyoxenfree.”



- Commenting is closed -
A Venue for Citizen Journalists
Thanks to generous donations from readers, this site is renovated and improved.
Affordability has been a ruse for creating market rate housing.
Represent Us and Our Interests. Please!
Local action in support of a proposal to rebuild nationwide infrastructure
Who’s Superman when you need him? We are.
From Musk’s big investment all the way to local campaigns, political “contributions” will be re-paid. Here’s how.
Private banks are fighting hard to keep us from starting our own state bank. There’s a reason.
To be so manifestly unqualified and yet not be deeply aware of that speaks exactly to the very point of not being qualified.
Chaos likely to ensue. Catastrophe cannot be ruled out.
There is no escape from the deep-throated roar and the clouds of filth produced by these machines.
A perspective from a very old liberal political junkie.
Deeds, not talk, count on Veterans Day
Several days ago, I received the following from Veterans Service Officer (VSO), Liz Witowski, of the Whatcom County Veterans Program (items below in bold are mine). On this Veterans Day, the
An off-budget $5 Trillion National Infrastructure Bank (NIB), along the lines of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) that operated between 1932-1957, means low-cost loans and no additions to the deficit.
Medicare Advantage is NOT Medicare. Medicare is there to provide health care. Medicare Advantage is a business, there to make money.
David Swanson verifies what Jon Humphrey has said for years: good internet access benefits people, cities, counties, and states.
Or perhaps tragic farce or farcical tragedy might be more apt descriptors. Pick one, or both.
After nearly 30 years online, and literally being one of the oldest blogs on the internet, Northwest Citizen needs a major programming overhaul. To do so, we need your help.
The top 20% of commercial banks in the United States control 95% of our total banking assets. Remember “Too-Big-to-Fail”?
The City has created another useless document ensuring nothing changes and mediocre communication services are protected.
Why a vote for Jason Call for Congress is a good vote for conservatives, liberals, Democrats and Republicans. Yes, an unusual idea.
Heaven forbid our reps should attack the main problem, Medicare Advantage, head on. But no. They must nibble around the edges to give the appearance of doing something.
Morally significant double binds force doctors and combat soldiers into identical life and death quandaries, damaging their moral centers. To these two groups we can also add law enforcement officers.
Eric Hirst gives us a brief and clear explanation of the water adjudication process that is beginning now in Whatcom County
“Citing the nonpartisan Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, the paper  [Less Care at Higher Cost—The Medicare Advantage Paradox] notes that Medicare Advantage (MA) plans have overcharged the
Aggressive citizen involvement carried the day.
Build-for-profit, incarceration-inspired housing is destroying our souls.
A 54-photo tour of the ruptured pipe area of the Whatcom Creek explosion taken in July 1999.
The last of the scrap metal is loaded on the ship and it will be gone from our town.
Below is an audio tape of 911 calls, emergency responders’ radio communications, and local radio coverage from June 10, 1999 when Whatcom Creek exploded in Bellingham
Whatcom County’s confusing water rights will be defined by court proceedings beginning now
The foam of secrecy hides all.
If not killed-in-action, they are still dying from the effects of their service in Vietnam.
Local presentations scheduled on a reasonable use framework for water resource management
Broadband-Washing: Greenwashing the Internet
Pacific Northwest organizers join a global campaign to abolish all nukes and push for a city council resolution to start
If the hospitals are smelling a rat, so should Medicare (Dis)Advantage victims (AKA enrollees).
With such a bank in place, we would likely not be scrambling around and asking Congress for rebuild monies, as we are now with the catastrophic event involving the Francis Scott Key bridge on March 26, 2024.
Port of Bellingham commissioners terminate last 13 years of ABC Recycling lease
No public fiber means we can’t compete with big telecom. EVER.